Category Archives: How To

I love doing screencasts… that is, little How To videos that focus on what’s going on onscreen with my voice in the background “teaching.”

However, frequently when I record a screencast I find myself needing to edit the audio and video separately… adding in a still frame, keeping a screen shot but editing out a bunch of UMs and AHs, etc.

But I don’t do them frequently enough to always remember the tips and tricks.

Frustrated, I Googled about a half-dozen variations on how to edit audio and video separately in Camtasia studio and kept coming across the same two results… the Camtastia How To that said to use ctrl-click (or right click) on the video or audio track and you would get an option that said “Separate Video and Audio” but that option was not showing up for me when I clicked my tracks. I also found several videos by a guy with such a deep Indian accent that I could hardly understand him, who went so quickly through the instruction that I couldn’t find out what was going on.

The other day I was trying to use the handy-dandy feature of the Bank of America mobile app to take a photo of a check to deposit it. However, every time I tried to snap the picture the app would crash.

As usual, I looked online for a solution and found one suggestion about changing the settings for Safari, but it didn’t work. Finally, I broke down and called Bank of America customer service. After 2+ minutes through the automated mail system, providing them with my bank account number and a bunch of verification information, I finally got the answer that worked. Here it is:

In Settings, go to Safari and change the setting for block cookies to Never.

The next step I thought was really weird, but it did work… Change the General Setting for Date and Time to a 24 Hour clock.

One of my biggest issues when moving from Outlook to Gmail was that Gmail wasn’t able to auto-magically create an event on my Google calendar that had a live link back to the original email. Often, emails are the source of an event added to your calendar and having a quick link makes life so much easier!

Used to be, (and this still does happen when the date is not spelled out in the email content) that if you wanted to create an event on your Google calendar from a Gmail message, you had to click more, then create event to ad a calendar event from an email.

And then the event was created, but only with the email text in the description section of the event instead of a live link back to the original email thread (also any links in the email became inactive and attachments were not included.)

But today, I noticed for the first time, that if you have an actual date typed in the email (always a good practice for clarity-sake) that Gmail can recognize, the date becomes an underlined link that you can click on to create an event. This functionality has been there a while, the recent twist comes next.

Here’e the best part! Now, when you add the event to your calendar, instead of the email content in the description area, you now have a live link back to the email source:

Which preserves the link to the whole email thread, live links in the email, attachments with the email, etc. etc. How wonderful! What a boon to gmail productivity. Thanks Google. Well done!

Do you know what a favicon is? For a long time, I knew what it was, but didn’t know that was the name for it. A favicon is the little image that you see on the tabs of your browser for different websites:

One of the nice things about the favicon is that it’s what shows up in your favorites list/bookmark bar next to the website. It can give you a quick visual on what site you’re on, or an easy reference point to get back to a tab isn’t active. If you can also get your logo image to look good in a favicon, it’s a great little branding image.

To get a favicon on your website, you either have to convert an existing image, or use a tool that can create a .ico file. I guess it can also be done with a .png or .gif file, I usually covert to an .ico file (since that was the way I learned to do it.)

A favicon is only 16 x 16 pixels, so the logo has to be identifiable at that size. My Ask Joanne “signature” logo doesn’t work as a favicon, so I use:

I’m sure you’ve seen the results… smiling faces next to search results. Have you wondered how to get your smiling face next to your content in the search results? It’s called Google Authorship Markup and it’s pretty easy to do.

Not only is there a little smiling face next to the article about Yext, but there’s also the “by Joanne Marcinek” link that, when clicked, leads to a listing of all my verified content. And there are the stats on how many people have the me in their Google+ circles.

Once you have a profile (with a recognizable headshot), the next step is make sure the content you’ve written has a byline with the same name as your Google+ Profile (eg. by Joanne Marcinek).

Next, verify that you have an email address with the same domain as your content (eg. ____@askjoanne.com). If you use a different email address (like ___@gmail.com) there’s another method for verification.

The second method involves a bit more coding and requires that you add a link to your code like this:

By putting in your website address in the testing tool, you will get a “report” back of whether Google is recognizing the authorship markup on your site:

That’s it. Pretty simple, but very powerful. Having Authorship Markup on your content can help you establish authority in your field, it helps people to recognize who you are and gives them the opportunity to easily follow you on Google+ or connect with you in other ways.

I’ve written about IFTTT.com before. It’s a wonderful tool to automate and track things that happen online by using triggers on different internet channels. In their own words, they are a service that lets you create powerful connections with a simple statement.

If this, then that. This little recipe, used on a variety of incoming and outgoing channels can create a very handy set of customized tools. Here are some of my recipes:

When I publish a blog post, or make a status update on my Facebook page, a note is added to my publishing calendar.

I can even send a text to IFTTT and have it record things I am tracking daily, like my weight or amount of exercise I’m getting.

There’s no end to the number of cool automated actions you can take to keep your favorite online tools connected.

By having these channels automated and connected I feel that I have a better handle on the information flow in my life. I will write again soon about Evernote and how learning to use it a little better (and installing the mobile and desktop versions) has also been a life changer for me.

What I really want now is a way to connect a private online journal so that posts get posted to my diary calendar. I tried WordPress, but a private blog won’t work with IFTTT, Penzu doesn’t have an RSS feed that I could access, nor does 280daily.

I won’t get into the details, but the basic premise is that if links are not tagged properly, Google doesn’t know where traffic is coming from and will dump it all into Direct Traffic.

This can be a problem because you are then unable to see if certain links via Social Media or other campaigns are generating traffic and ROI.

Tagging links before you post them on Social Media or send out via email is an extra step, but it’s easy to do and the results are definitely worth it in the long run.

Google has a URL Builder tool to help you build links. I’ve written a blog post that I want to send out via my social media channels. Let’s walk through the process of tagging the URL to get the best data in Google analytics.

You can label the required fields any way you like. For this post, I am labeling the Campaign Source as facebook (because that’s where I’ll be putting the post), the Campaign Medium is personal because I will be posting it on my personal Facebook profile. If I were posting it on a Facebook business page, I would put the name of the page here. And last, the Campaign Name is musings to identify that it is a post in that category on my blog.

As I said, you can label the required fields any way you like, but it does make sense to be consistent in how you name your Campaign Source/Medium and Name so that when you later view your analytics, you can properly track your data.

When the required fields are filled in, just click Submit and you will have a tagged URL that you can copy and share:

While this is an extra step in the sharing process, the information you are able to track later will make it worth it. It would be especially important for email campaigns or advertising that you are doing in other online publications to track that you are getting a return on your investment.

I am finally getting back into making screencast tutorials – this time I’m uploading via Wistia (more on that later.)

Here’s a quick tutorial on making custom profile image collages using your own photos and Picasa.

I tried to get a transcription* with captions but OMG, the voice recognition was terrible. I guess I have to train my software and speak more clearly. I won’t even tell you the number of UMmmmms I had to delete!

Oh, one last note, obviously you don’t have to create collages for your profiles pages, often you have a terrific single picture you want to use. The custom aspect ratios you create can be used when you are cropping photos. So you can choose exactly how the image will be cropped and displayed on your profile page.

* Having a text transcript on your videos can be a real boon. Not only to the people who would prefer the sound to be off and read the instruction, but also because your transcript is yet another way the search engines know how to index your video.

I am a big fan of things that are fast, easy and free. I used to design websites in HTML, but since I am not an artist, they were, at best, utilitarian and rather plain. I now leave the real designing to professionals like SJP Designs and Group Somma. However, when I get an idea and I want a website up and running quickly. I head to WordPress.

For Registering a domain, I recommend GoDaddy. My only pet peeve with them is the concentrated “up-sell” you have to go through to actually get a domain name registered. I tend to answer “no thanks” to almost all they offer.

I also prefer to keep my domain registrar and hosting companies separate. You’re probably fine registering and hosting with GoDaddy, but early in my career I got burned when the company I was registered with/hosting went out of business. It took a lot of time and effort to get the domain registered with a new registrar.

So, once you own the domain, get a hosting account setup. I use Westhost and have for over 12 years. They are a great company, reasonably priced, with very good customer service. They also offer WordPress one click install with a lot of fantastic available themes for free with your hosting account.

Next step once WordPress is installed on your website is to set it up as the main platform for your domain (instead of just as an add-on blog). This is where I think WordPress can really shine… no programmer/designer required a complete DIY solution.

The next steps get a little bit technical, but not overwhelming. You’ll need to be able to use FTP to upload/download files and feel confident enough to copy some files and change a couple of lines of code.

I wrote a few Hubpage articles about how to use WordPress as your Main Domain and how to use a static homepage on your site (instead of the homepage going right to the blog).